This cycle of 8 lectures could
be titled ‘Philosophies of Dialogue’ or ‘The Hermeneutics of Dialogue’.
Its aim is to offer an understanding of the role of hermeneutics in the present
cultural and philosophical climate. It is argued that even Post modernity, in
its most ethical instances, points towards the possibility of Dialogue, which is
to be understood more in terms of ‘weak logos’ rather than as the ‘All
Powerful Logos’ of Western philosophy.

This
quote by Odo Marquard summarizes the main thrust of this cycle of Lectures:

If
– regarding a holy text – two interpreters, contradicting each other,
assert: ‘I am right, my understanding of the text is the truth, and a truth
imperative for salvation’ – it may come to a fight. But if they agree
instead that the text can be understood in a different way, and that is not
enough, in another way, and yet another – they may rather start to negotiate
– and who negotiates does not kill. The ‘pluralizing hermeneutics’, unlike
the ‘singularizing hermeneutics’, augurs a ‘being towards the text’ in
lieu of the ‘being towards murder’. (Odo Marquard)

Abstract
of Lectures

Introduction
As a general introduction to Western Hermeneutics, I will discuss:

a. The modern significance of an ancient usage (Hermeneuein/Hermeneia)
b. Three directions of meaning: to say (orality), to explain, to translate;
c. Six definitions of Hermeneutics

’Henceforth, to understand is to understand oneself in front of the text.
It is not a question of imposing upon the text our finite capacity of
understanding, but of exposing ourselves to the text and receiving from it
an enlarged self, which would be the proposed existence corresponding in the
most suitable way to the world proposed… In this respect, it would be more
correct to say that the self is constituted by the ‘matter’ of the
text’.

As one of the leading philosophers in post-war France, Ricoeur has written
with originality and authority on an astonishing variety of topics. During
the last few years, he has turned his attention more directly to problems of
language, entering into a sustained dialogue with the tradition of
hermeneutics. In order to appreciate fully the significance of Ricoeur’s
current work, it is necessary to have some perspective on his writings as a
whole. The aim of this introduction is to provide such an overall view. We
will begin by tracing the evolution of Ricoeur’s thought, from his early
project for a philosophy of the will, through his encounters with
psychoanalysis and structuralism, to his recent preoccupation with the
theory of the text. In the second part, we shall sketch the central themes
of Ricoeur’s current work.

1. Philosophy of the Will
2. Examination of Psychoanalysis
3. Confrontation with Structuralism
4. Discourse and Creativity
5. Text and the Theory of Interpretation
6. Action and History
7. Hermeneutics and Philosophical Reflections

Michel
de Certeau (1925-1986): Interpretation and its Other.

Since his death in 1986, Michel de Certeau’s reputation as a thinker has
steadily grown both in France and throughout the English-speaking world. His
work is extraordinarily innovative and wide-ranging, cutting across issues
in historiography, literary and cultural studies, anthropology, sociology,
theology, philosophy and psychoanalysis.
“To look at processes in this way, to ‘interpret’, in the musical
sense of the term, this mystic writing as a different utterance, is to
consider it a past from which we are cut off and not to presume ourselves to
be in the same place it was; it is the attempt to execute its movement for
ourselves, to retrace the steps of a labour but from afar… To do this is
to remain within a scriptural experience and to retain that sense of modesty
which respects distances…”.
“A (‘popular’) use of religion modifies its functioning. A way of
speaking this received language transforms it into a song of resistance, but
this eternal metamorphosis does not in any way compromise the sincerity with
which it may be believed nor the lucidity with which, from another point of
view, the struggles and inequalities hidden under the established order may
be perceived…”.

1. The histrographical operation
2. Interpretation and its archaeology
3. Voices in the text
4. Mystics
5. Strategies and tactics

Makhail
Bakhtin’s ‘Dialogical Principle’

Todorov, at the end of his study on Bakhtin, reveals the paradox to which
even the most stubborn researcher of Dialogue can fall prey: that of having
no listener or of receiving no answer. Bakhtin’s hope had been that of
finding, at some point, a sort of super-receiver who would pay attention to
the voices, both his and others’, which had fallen into the silence of
history, and thus continue the dialogue. It seems that lately Bakhtin’s
voice in the West has received considerable attention not only by linguists,
literary critics and philosophers, but also by anthropologists, and that he
‘is emerging as one of the major thinkers of the twentieth century’.

Emmanuel
Levinas (1905-1997): The face-to-face encounter with the Other

“The idea of the face is the idea of gratuitous act. Commanding love.
Commanding love signifies recognizing the value of love itself. The face
does not give itself to be seen. It is not a vision. The face is not that
which is seen. I began today by saying that the face is not an object of
knowledge [une connaissance]… there is rather an order, in the
sense that the face is a commanded value. Consequently you could call it
generosity; in other terms it is a moment of faith… Faith is not a
question of the existence or non-existence of God. It is believing that love
without reward is valuable…God is the commandment of love…”

“The ethical ‘I’ is subjectivity precisely insofar as it kneels before
the other, sacrificing its own liberty to the more primordial call of the
other… Ethics redefines subjectivity as this heteronomous responsibility,
in contrast to autonomous freedom… I can never escape the fact that the
other has demanded a response from me before I affirm my freedom not
to respond to his demand. Ethical freedom is une difficile liberte,
a heteronomous freedom obliged to the other…”

1. Knowledge and Power
2. The Authority of the Face
3. Totality and Infinity
4. The Foundation of Ethics
5. Levinas’s contribution to contemporary debate

The
Philosophical Turn in hermeneutics: Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900 - )

’The interpreter dealing with a traditional text seeks to apply it to
himself. But this does not mean that the text is given for him as something
universal, that he understands it as such and only afterwards uses it for
particular applications. Rather, the interpreter seeks no more than to
understand this universal thing, the text; i.e. to understand what this
piece of tradition says, what constitutes the meaning and importance of the
text. In order to understand that, he must not seek to disregard himself and
his particular hermeneutical situation. He must relater the text to this
situation, if he wants to understand at all’ (Truth and Method).

Within the framework of Truth and Method the “universal” aspect of
hermeneutics has at least one meaning that is easily explained. It indicates
that the traditional hermeneutics – that of the human sciences – has
been superseded in the direction of a philosophical hermeneutics that
accords the “hermeneutics phenomenon” its full breadth. For philosophy,
this universality means that hermeneutic inquiry cannot be limited to the
ancillary problem of devising a methodology for the human sciences. The
quest for understanding and language is not merely a methodological problem
but a fundamental characteristic of human facility (to use Heidegger’s
term). Emphasizing the “universal aspect” of hermeneutics then, opposes
confining hermeneutics to the human sciences. The whole of Gadamer’s
philosophical efforts are directed toward broadening the horizon of
hermeneutics so far beyond the human sciences narrowly conceived that it
becomes a central occupation of philosophy. It is precisely this that is
meant by broadening hermeneutics to become the universal inquiry of
philosophy and by the “Ontological Turn of Hermeneutics,” as the title
of the third section of Truth and Method phrases it. In this final part,
Gadamer turns hermeneutics inquiry away from and beyond the hermeneutics of
the human sciences, the subject of the first two parts, and toward the
greater universality, that of the ontological or philosophical dimension
expressed and revealed in language.

1. The inconsistency of Method
2. The historicality of understanding
3. The I-Thou dialogue
4. The Linguisticality of Understanding
5. The Universality of the Hermeneutic Understanding

Some
notes on the ‘Epistemology and Methodology’ of ‘Reciprocal
Knowledge’

This paper is concerned with delineating a possible epistemology and
relevant, methodology for reciprocal knowledge. I attempt to do this by
breaking down the various parts of the initial title/statement in order to
arrive at some partial conclusions. It is argued that a distinction should
be made at the outset on the importance of unfolding the intended title from
epistemology to ‘epistemologies’ thus clarifying my own position as one
of many epistemologies possible to attain the desired results. In a sense, I
am stating here that my discourse is limited to Western thinking or, at
least, it rests on this premise and that this is the first limitation that
makes me aware of the necessary presence of other epistemologies.